Hacking a Motorised Telescope with Arduino
[Issue 52] We show you how to reverse engineer a cheap telescope so that you can add automation using an Arduino.
This telescope, in particular, is a GoTo model. It has a set of motors that, when requested by a hand controller, will ‘slew’ to any object in the sky. This saves the hassle of trying to manually mess about with knobs and instead will move the telescope to precise positions at the press of a button. The hand controller it came with resembles a mobile phone from the mid-1990s and is comparably frustrating to use.
For our Arduino-powered telescope, the feature we wanted to implement was the ability to control it with a computer through a planetarium app. A planetarium is basically just Google Maps for stars and planets, which includes plenty of information and visuals about everything you can see (and can’t see) above you.
Follow along as we show you our prototyping setup using an Arduino-compatible Uno and then build something permanent using an Arduino Nano.
Read all about it on page 10 of Issue 52 or visit https://diyode.io/052yxcv